Speculations on Transpositional Photography

Both photographs occupy the prominent positions as universally known and culturally relevant "moments of truth" which only an aloof camera eye could transform into the objective historical and anthropological value. There are no controversies about whether these two photographs depict events as they really happened -did Federico Borrell García really died on the spot where he was photographed and was the American flag truly hoisted on the Suribachi mountain -and could it be the case that the photographs' factography or iconography has been adjusted to the wishes of news agency, needs of political opportunism or authors' creative interpretation. These are the images of real events and they have become part of imagery of warfare history and visual culture in general. Though these two photographs are not the same, their difference evolve not so much from a fact they present two entirely different events as much as from a manner in which they were shot. A snapshot by Robert Capa is an unrepeatable and unique moment in time when Federico Borrrell suddenly fell down, hit by a nationalist soldier's deadly bullet. On the other hand rather than precede it. Therefore, we can support Martin Jay's claim that following the visual turn images cannot be understood as the signs that, due to analogy with natural objects, still possess some universal communication power. 2 On contrary, today the meaning of images is constituted through processes of resemantization or, as Norman Bryson would put it, by ascribing images with "discursive" features and by abandoning their "figural" features.

Ever since their invention, photographic images have often been thought to be a special kind of image. Often, photography has been claimed to be a particularly realistic medium. At other times, photographs are said to be epistemically superior to other types of image. Yet another way in which photographs apparently are special is that our subjective experience of looking at photographs seems very different from our experience of looking at other types of image, such as paintings and drawings. While the other seemingly distinctive aspects of photography have been quite thoroughly discussed in the literature, theories of the experience of photography, or in other words, theories of its special phenomenology, are less common. To be sure, the phenomenon has often been pointed out and described, but explanations of the phenomenology of photography are rare. In this paper, I attempt an explanation of at least part of the phenomenology of photography by appealing to the idea, borrowed from André Bazin, that a photograph is a certain kind of trace. Along the way, it is also argued that Kendall Walton's so called “transparency thesis” cannot give a plausible explanation of the phenomenology associated with looking at photographs.

PhaenEx, 2010

The present essay aims to make good on what turns out to be a promissory note signed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. There, in the opening pages, he writes that he wished to identify photography"s "essential features" through a phenomenology, and that " [he] wanted to learn at all costs what Photography was "in itself"" (3). Yet, in the years that have passed, it has become increasingly clear that he neither accomplished this aim, nor that he ever really intended to do so. Jacques Derrida shows quite clearly that the work fails to achieve its aims, and that it enacts this failure by contradicting its claims to universality. 1 Patrick Maynard similarly argues that Camera Lucida has really nothing to say about photography at all, and is instead a meditation on representation and mourning. 2 Finally, Nancy Shawcross provides what is perhaps the most compelling reason for this failure, namely that the work is an experiment in what Barthes called the "third form" of literature, between an essay and a novel, so that any straightforward extrapolation is bound to be mistaken. 3 The result is that scholarship on this matter has tended to focus on what can be salvaged from the project, if anything, for reflection on photography. 4 Yet, and here is the question I want to pursue, what would have resulted had Barthes stuck to his stated aim of pursuing an eidetic phenomenology? Has something been overlooked in the phenomenological tradition, which has favored painting almost exclusively in -13-L. Sebastian Purcell the visual arts? Is there something troubling in the photograph for the status of the phenomenon?

There are many ways of constructing pictures of the world, and photography is only one of these. Nevertheless, it is no doubt the type of picture that has been most thoroughly studied in semiotics, as well as the kind which semiotics has contributed in the greatest degree to elucidating. In this overview, we get acquainted with René Lindekens’ and Hartmut Espe’s early attempt at creating an experimental semiotics of photography, as well as with numerous studies of particular uses to which photographs may be put, such a news pictures and publicity. We look at Jean-Marie Floch’s masterly analyses of particular photographs, which however do not purport to say anything about the specificity of photography. Following a suggestion by Philippe Dubois, we will take our point of departure in the idea that the study of photography, both in its pre-semiotic and its semiotic phases, has first treated the photograph as being a kind of icon (a similarity motivated sign), then a conventional signs, more or less comparable to verbal signs, and finally as an index, a sign motivated by the very continuity of the apparatus creating the expression to the corresponding content in the real world. The idea of photographs being icons of course goes back to Roland Barthes, as does so much else in pictorial semiotics, and Umberto Eco, by implication, and René Lindekens explicitly, argued that pictures were conventional. The indexicality thesis was argued in three fundamental books, by Philippe Dubois himself, by Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Henri Vanlier, all published in the early eighties of the last century. Immensely enlightening as these books are, they were shown in the late eighties, in several publication by Göran Sonesson, to be mistaken on many issues, to make a confused used of semiotic concepts, and the be unable to isolated the specificity of photography. Sonesson instead argued that iconicity, but not in the simplistic way in which it was imagined by Roland Barthes, must in spite of all be fundamental to photographs, as to all pictures, and that indexicality can only have a secondary importance. He also suggested that what really made the difference between photographs and other pictures were the global, instead of local, mapping rules that they applied to perceptual reality. The review is brought up to the present time, when there have been a few more book-length publications, which however merely seems to rehearse the old arguments. The future of a semiotics of photography, however, is argued to be in a return to the experimental approach of Lindekens and Espe.

Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, Vol. 11, 05-Special Issue, 2019

A photograph can be described as an imitation of reality, but this description is so primitive. A photograph is not just a copy of reality, nor is it just a reproduction of things that actually exist. It could be argued that a photograph is the imitation of the subject that exits in reality so as to become a symbol that hides behind it various meanings. In other words, a photograph is an existence that includes another existence and this dual existence makes the photograph be framed by the limits of truth, knowledge, time and place. Therefore, the photograph becomes a way of truth happening and revealing, but at the same time it has interrelations with the visual, the tangible and the meaning represented in the thing itself. The truth is revealed only by the intentional vision which opens up the phenomenological position in all its dimensions. The establishment of this position is based on photograph that becomes the first drive and motive for the act of imagination.

2019

This chapter connects Heidegger’s critique of identity and metaphysics with his later work on the question of technology to propose that photography, understood as an image making technology, provides a privileged point of entry into the question of ontological difference. The work of Lyotard and Deleuze, while not directly engaging with photography, seems to be pointing in this direction. My assertion is that the ‘step back’ out of metaphysics does not proceed by way of language (as Heidegger would have it) but by the way of the technical image. For this reason, photography is the visual counterpart of non-representational thinking. This paper argues that Heidegger’s inability to exit metaphysics is tied to his failure to recognise that such a leap is accomplished by means of an automata, or technology that is capable of mimetic expression. The understanding of photography as the poetic expression of techne, implies that photography is the ‘graven image’ of the age of cybernetics a...

2012

Slavic Review, 2017

How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end?" asked Roland Barthes in his now-classic essay "Rhetoric of the image." 1 At first glance, Barthes's questions might appear nonsensical, but as this discussion around the various uses and misuses of Evgenii Khaldei's photographs of wartime Budapest demonstrates, the question of meaning and truth in photography is anything but simple. This is because the meaning of a photograph is shaped by a multitude of factors, both internal and external to the image itself, and because the photographic medium, more so than other visual practices, lends itself to expectations of verisimilitude that obscure the complex relationship that photographs have to reality that they purportedly record. As far as the expectations of verisimilitude are concerned, they derive in large part from the mechanical nature of the photographic process: the light rays hit the film (or a light-sensitive plate), and an image of the objects or bodies in front of the lens is recorded by the camera. 2 This is indeed the most striking feature of photographic technology when viewed in the context of other 19 th century visual media; it is what earned it "the pencil of nature" moniker from one of its early adopters and proselytizers, William Henry Fox Talbot. 3 My reading of Peter Pastor's essay suggests that Pastor is close to Talbot's vision of photography as an inherently privileged technology as far as unmediated access to reality is concerned. While Pastor appreciates the possibility that photographs could be arranged or staged, and that shots could also be altered post-production (and wisely insists on the importance of source criticism in approaching images as data), he also preserves the possibility of an "authentic" photo, a "genuine camera shot, which in a Rankean sense, documents an event as it happened." In my view, this word choice brings in assumptions about photography that obscure more than they clarify. This is not to say that engaging in source criticism or inquiring into the date, place and subject attribution are worthless pursuits. Indeed, Pastor's meticulous research into the history of Khaldei's photographs and their uses is a highly valuable addition to our body of knowledge on the history of Soviet photography and the politics of memory of WWII in eastern Europe today. Due to his essay, we doubtlessly know more than we did before. However, I take issue with the assumption that all subsequent uses of Khaldei's images by authors as diverse as Cornelius, Pető, Frąs, and Stańczyk are equally problematic insofar as they fail to explicitly connect the photographs to the specific circumstances in which they were taken. Such conclusion seems to glide over important disciplinary and interpretative